He remembered wondering why it wasn't raining. It always rained here in this black hole, always rained like the weather was doing its best to remind you that hey, your life sucks so here's a little extra kick in the crotch for good measure. It rained when you woke up and it rained when you tried to sleep and in the short periods when it wasn't raining the air was cold and clammy and the streets glistened with puddles that never quite dried up. It was a miserable place and he longed to get out of it, to go anywhere so long as it wasn't here and he was finally going to. He was finally leaving and he had convinced himself it was the right thing to do, even if it meant leaving behind everything he knew, even if it meant the one person in the world who should have come with him was going to deny him once again. Roxas had made up his mind, the rooster had crowed, and he was finally on his way out to take control of his own life. No one was going to control him anymore.
Only it wasn't raining.
He remembered an almost debilitating sense of irony so great it made a part of him want to bend over and laugh until he cried, because he wasn't crying and he wanted to cry but he couldn't because he knew if he did he wouldn't keep walking. His feet would stop and his body would shut down and he'd just sort of crumble up in a pathetic heap on the sidewalk and cry out all of the stupid ironic water that should have been falling out of the stupid ironic sky but wasn't. So he didn't cry. He didn't cry and he didn't look anywhere but straight ahead, and he kept walking.
He remembered what Axel said and he remembered feeling like the words were almost a parting shot. He said Organization and destroy you to cover what he really wanted to say, to hide the words that were really important, but Axel always did that. Roxas hated him for it even though he couldn't hate Axel, not ever, not even if he tried and no matter what. But he told himself he hated and deep down inside he knew the real reason he was so upset was because the neither of them could say what they really meant, that Axel only knew how to lie to himself and Roxas only knew how to get angry and let him.
And in that moment of remembering it was like the floodgate opened and everything came back in a rush so intense Roxas was almost lost in it. He remembered all the things he wasn't supposed to remember, all the things that had been stolen from him: the first time they'd met and Axel had said they didn't exactly throw parties or have parades for new inductees, especially not when they were too short to reach the dinner table, but he supposed he could buy him ice cream anyway. Roxas would have been offended except for the fact that somehow he knew Axel was only kidding and that he liked Roxas very much, and Roxas liked him back. He remembered sitting on the clock tower in Twilight Town, the real Twilight Town, and asking what happened next and Axel saying he didn't really know, he just let everybody think that he did and that was usually good enough. That was the first time Roxas had ever really laughed at anything, and it felt good, even though it hadn't lasted very long and he knew he'd only ever really be able to laugh like that in front of Axel.
They couldn't go back to Twilight Town all the time but they found other places – Axel liked bean buns and Roxas thought they were okay, if squishy, and they would sit on the roofs of buildings painted green and red with neon light and sometimes they would talk and sometimes they wouldn't say anything at all, and sometimes it would rain and sometimes it wouldn't. Axel was missing a heart and Roxas was half of one and somehow the silences and the words came to fill the void between those spaces, even though neither one of them could have explained it if anyone had asked them. They never talked about it for fear that talking would break the dream, shatter it into a million pieces they wouldn't be able to pick up and piece back together.
There were the arguments, the fights, the stony silences where one word would go wrong and turn into a string of words the neither of them could stop, like an oncoming train spinning off tracks, the times when Roxas closed up and Axel closed off. There were the lies told and untold and for every one of them Roxas knew, he knew, even if he didn't know all of the truth. Axel didn't want Roxas to go and find that replacement and Roxas didn't want to stay and be a puppet for people who wouldn't even admit they cared.
And the whole time the pictures were playing in his head like a broken celluloid, but instead of flipping into white they just kept going, faster and faster and he realized with a sickening finality that he'd never stopped being a puppet, not really. He'd left hoping to find his own path and in the end the path he'd found hadn't even been real. A person could go their whole life and not realize a part of their reality was a lie but the minute the bubble was burst there was no going back. The friends and the memories and the family he'd had here were nothing he could go back to, not now, not even if he could. Even if he was free of Sora and free of the strings that bound him, he couldn't ever go back. All of it was fake and wrong and the only real thing that had ever truly mattered to him was standing there with a heaving chest and a defeat in his eyes that no amount of apologies from Roxas would erase away.
"Axel," he said, and the intonation of the name was like an ending. I remember you. I remember everything. He met those eyes and there was so much there, so much he wanted to say about how sorry he was, about how he never should have left, about how he'd regretted every moment since (when he could remember) and still regretted it even now. He wanted to tell Axel all the things they'd never said and merely let rest in silence, he wanted to thank him for the ice cream, for the bean buns, for not laughing at him when the unfamiliarity of the thunder and the rain made him jump and seek shelter in the warmth of Axel's bed. He wanted to say how stupid they were, how stupid they both were but especially him, because they'd really had something special and now it was ruined because they'd listened to everyone else but themselves. He wanted to say it all, but he couldn't.
"Let's meet again, in the next life," Axel finally said, with that self-deprecating smirk he sometimes wore when he knew he was saying something just to fill an awkward silence. He didn't think Axel believed what he was saying and yet at the same time Roxas knew with all the certainty he knew the sky was blue that if there was a next life Axel would be there and if there wasn't then he'd spend the rest of eternity looking for one. Roxas didn't know about lives and he didn't know what was going to happen but right then he swore that if there was an endless slumber after this, he wouldn't rest unless Axel was there to tell him to go to sleep and to stop being afraid of the dark.
"Yeah," he said, because he knew Axel was going and he knew he couldn't stop him. He knew he couldn't cry because if he cried then he wouldn't be able to keep going and he'd just crumble down on his knees right there and that would be the end of everything, forever. And if they ever wanted to find each other again, Roxas had to keep walking.
"I'll be waiting."